Sampling for a dreary Friday

Luscious, lustrous locks for fine crisp yarn:



And springy churn dashes to help counteract the gloom:



There's a lot of snow and "Arctic chill" in the forecast for this weekend, so maybe I'll have more to show by Monday!

After 400m

This shawl-to-be is a shapeless grey blob right now, but I like the little scallops along the hypotenuse.

Glovely thoughts

I celebrated my birthday week the other week by eating an enormous amount of cake, watching all of Arrested Development again, and knitting with some decadent yarn.



It's Camelspin by Handmaiden, 70% silk and 30% camel. In the skein it feels heavy and sumptuous and it has some of that distinctive silky scroop. The camel portion of the yarn fuzzes up subtly with handling and is a different colour from the silk, so the finished fabric has a soft iridescence to it and changes colours at different angles.



What the yarn doesn't have is any memory or stretch whatsoever. Normally my feeling would be that it's inappropriate glove yarn for this reason; gloves tend to sag unless there's some built-in negative ease, and a resolutely unstretchy yarn won't give and bounce back the way a springy wool will. And if you favour non-ribbed cuffs like I do then unstretchy silk gloves are definitely going to bunch and sag on the palm side of the wrist, where the forearm narrows just below the base of the hand.

I won't claim that these are totally perfect despite all the reasons they shouldn't be, but I will show you the countermeasures I took to mitigate the yarn's natural tendency to make terrible gloves.



The very edge of the cuff has some bands of reverse stockinette because I was thinking about ganseys. The reverse stockinette bands want to pull in lengthwise even though the yarn would prefer to stretch out and never come back, so I added two more bands on the palm side at the wrist to delineate the palm from the cuff. When I wear them and bend at the wrist, the bands take up the slack created and absorb the bunching. (Score.)

The other countermeasure is that I picked a stitch pattern with a lot of squish and stretch. Each zigzagging purled stripe does the same thing as the reverse stockinette bands on a smaller scale, so the fabric ended up feeling supple and stretchy after all. The plain stockinette palms feel in danger of sagging when I wear the gloves, but the sagging is held in check by the clinginess of the backs of the hands and the bands at the wrists.

The fingers took a few tries to get right. Even an eighth of an inch too short felt constricting and awful, so I erred on the side of making them slightly too long. (Too short means that I couldn't ball my hands into fists; too long means freer motion!) I put little finger stitches on hold about three eighths of an inch below where I began the rest of the fingers, again to mitigate sagginess in the palm.

Anyway, the subtle fit problems and measures to counteract them flee my mind as soon as I put them on, because the fabric feels beautiful against my skin. I would never want to knit anything not meant to be worn against the skin out of this yarn; what a waste of that downy halo it would be. I do want to knit another pair in a tightly-spun and bouncy wool yarn, though.

Quick hit

It's nighttime and the light is poor, but I wanted to show you one reason why it's good to pick a sticky yarn for stranded colourwork.



Am I right, or am I right? I knitted a mitten and blocked it last night, but in the cold light of day I was not very happy about the tip shaping. So I unpicked the kitchenered tip and unravelled the knitting to the beginning of my original shaping. My gauge is 11 sts/inch and it'd be a real pain to chase laddered stitches around, but I ended up not needing to—look how obediently my stitches are waiting to be picked up.

(This little tiled pattern is the palm; the back of the hand has a bigger checkerboard-with-motifs-inside arrangement on it.)

Mismatched

I knitted a prototype of these months ago, glowered at their saggy cuffs, and put them away. This month I finally gathered the resolve to unravel and try again.

Their original problem was that I had operated under the assumption that my colourwork tension would make the mittens too snug around the wrist unless I took some measures, so I cast on extra stitches and decreased them away after finishing the stranded section breaking off the contrast colour. MISTAKE! The fabric the yarn produces at this gauge is soft and pliable, so instead of not-too-snug cuffs I had saggy, baggy, can't-do-anything-with-'em cuffs attached to otherwise perfectly fine mittens. They annoyed me too much to countenance wearing or looking at them, so I shoved them in a drawer and resolved not to think about them until the annoyance had subsided.

Their time came when I was slogging through these other endless mittens and I wanted a small treat to work on in between sessions of black cotton blend stockinette at a dense gauge (my hands ache thinking about it). The yarn (Jo Sharp Silkroad DK) stood up well to being unravelled, no undue fluffiness or breakage. I skeined it and washed it and hung it to dry to bring some life back into it since it was feeling flatter than it had before, and it revived nicely. (Since we're talking like 200m of yarn, the unravelling-skeining-rewinding took very little time.)

The knitting itself took about two days, because puffy, tweedy, heathery, soft DK yarn on 2.75mm needles in the round is my happy place.



I solved the saggy cuffs problem by doing exactly nothing about it. There's the same number of stitches in the hand as in the cuff; the double-thickness of the colourwork section and the slightly tighter tension draws it in comfortably, though it's elastic enough to slide over the hand with no problem. It was a good reminder that while it is a good idea to put thought into a project, it is not always necessary to overthink.



The tips spiral in opposite directions because I cannot stand to knit the same thing twice. Four stitches get decreased every alternate round, with the decreases spaced evenly around and the total stitches decreased to four to make a pointed tip. (I like wearing pointy-tipped mittens as an adult woman though I have never seen any others worn out in the wild except by small children. Screw you, world, I wear what I want!)

Since it is my birthday today I am going to admit something nerdy: the colourwork part is loosely adapted from what I remember of a carpet that appears in an 18-year-old video game. It turns out that my recollection: not so accurate! But the knitting is an accurate reflection of the memory, at least.

wordless Wednesday: small hands and big

Warm fuzzies

I have been knitting a bit that I can show off, but it's not terribly interesting: new mittens for the aforementioned partner, to replace the pair that vanished at the end of last winter. The shells are the dullest fabric you've ever imagined—vast expanses of black stockinette—but the linings are a brightly-coloured secret.



The yarn is Blue Sky Alpacas Brushed Suri, and it's soft like fuzzy kitten tummies. I don't think I'd want to wear it on its own as the outside of a hand covering, but mittens lined with it will be absurdly warm.

It might be a little idiosyncratic to knit mitten liners separately from the mittens they will line (actually, I knitted them first!), but I am doing it this way for a couple of reasons. First, the liner alone is much lighter than a liner being knit from stitches picked up from its mitten shell, and the lighter the better so far as my wrists are concerned. Second, since my partner is quite fussy about how things fit, I wanted him to be able to try on a mitten shell with liner already inside while the shell was still in progress, to ensure that they had the right amount of ease and to minimize the number of corrections I'll have to make after they're finished. I think this would be less of an issue with a finer liner (heh) or a stretchier shell, but these liners are thick and the shells are a wool/cotton blend knitted up at a bulletproof gauge.